We Are Not Ourselves(183)
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His roommate was named Reinhold Huggins. Mr. Huggins had been a celebrated piano teacher. Now he pushed a walker around and refused to wear an undershirt under his hospital robe, his naked back bisected by the tight string, his steps tiny and shuffling, his posture slightly hunched. He was surprisingly alert. He didn’t say anything unprompted, except to ask for water, but if she asked how he was doing he would say, “Rather well, thank you, and yourself?” always quietly and gently, so that she had to lean in to hear him, and without the rising intonation that would have made the statement a question. Despite his manner of speaking, he was fearsome-looking, with a hoary, streaked beard and an unsmiling visage. The one time she had tried to direct him to the piano in the lounge, he gripped her shoulders with his long, bony fingers and squeezed hard. She didn’t do it again. Often when he spoke or sat in his chair, he raised his forefinger and beat it back and forth like a metronome. Other than that, he wasn’t a bad roommate; there were worse in the building.
Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Sonnabend liked to sit in the lounge and talk by the picture window. Eileen was surprised at how present they were. Watching from a distance, she became convinced, by their facial expressions, laughs, hand gestures, and the way they interrupted one another to make an excited point, that they were gushing over their grandkids. After she’d seen them there enough times, she grew fascinated enough to get up close to listen in. Mrs. Klein said, “My daughter, my daughter, she’s going to come, my daughter, with a hundred dollars,” and Mrs. Sonnabend responded, over and over, with something that sounded like “Gesundheit.”
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On December 2, 1997, she made it to her ten-year pension. Before she left for work, she called Connell in Berlin, but he wasn’t home, and she was almost relieved not to get him. She wasn’t sure he’d have appreciated the full significance of the news, and she didn’t want to feel silly or diminished about it, so she left a message for him to call her and figured she’d hear from him in a week or so, when it would be just another curiosity to report. On this day, the actual day of the event, she felt too raw to mention anything about it and risk not hearing back from him. It meant more to her than she would ever have guessed it would. She hadn’t always been sure she’d get to this day, and it wasn’t even about health insurance anymore so much as having something to strive for, something that allowed her life to hang together.
She went to the home after work with a half bottle of champagne. A drum circle had been organized in the community room; Kacey the social director was standing in the center, her own drum suspended from a strap around her neck. Eileen stopped in the doorway to watch. Kacey was slapping at her drum, which was fancier than the others, and looking at the patients with a manic grin, trying to get them to imitate her. The gathering was mostly women, though a few men were scattered throughout. Eileen was glad Ed’s physical infirmity kept him out of activities like this. She watched long enough to hear the haphazard drumming peter out. Kacey slapped each hand down once in quick succession, generating a popping sound like that of a plastic cup hitting a hardwood floor. “Now you!” Kacey said, earnestly, casting about with imploring eyes. An old woman sighed and said, “Oh, come on,” and Eileen wanted to hug her in gratitude.
She found him in his room. The popping cork startled him; his eyes widened, though he didn’t move. She had to pour the champagne slowly into his mouth to keep him from dribbling it all out, but once he could feel the bubbles on his tongue he lapped it up. She could have sworn she detected a smile on his lips when she told him her news.
For years she had imagined she might be moved to retire the day she’d secured the pension, but as she sat there finishing off the little bottle, she realized that even if her financial situation had worked out better, and even if the cost of the nursing home didn’t go up every six months, to almost seven thousand a month now, she wouldn’t be giving a passing thought to quitting. If she retired she would have nothing to do but spend all day at the home, and she still had some life left to give. One of the inescapable facts of her existence was that she was good at her job. She had spent her life thinking of all the other things she might have been—a lawyer, she’d often concluded, or a politician, which was probably the best career for any child of Big Mike Tumulty’s, even if that child didn’t happen to be male—but now it struck her that she was doing what she did best. Her profession had been becoming hers the whole time she’d been looking away from it. The point wasn’t always to do what you want. The point was to do what you did and to do it well. She had worked hard for years, and if she had nothing to show for it but her house and her son’s education, there was still the fact of its having happened, which no one could erase from the record of human lives, even if no one was keeping one.
91
The morning after Thanksgiving of 1998, Connell went up to the home alone. After his visit, he got halfway down the hall before he headed back to his father’s room and stood in the doorway looking in; then he left again. When he was about to turn the key in the car, he went back in again, but this time he entered the room. He sat in the chair next to his father’s bed and took his father’s hand as though he’d just arrived.
At noon, they went to lunch. The lunchroom was noisy with women calling for help or screaming incoherently, which pierced the fog in which his father was generally lost and caused him to tremble and start in his wheelchair. Connell attributed this to his father’s chivalrous nature. The men’s screams didn’t have the same effect.